> But recently, cracks have been starting to show. Norwegians are taking much more sick leave than a decade ago, driving up costs for health services. Student test scores have worsened more than in other Scandinavian countries, and critics of the government say there are too many boondoggle tunnels and bridges to nowhere.

These are the issues they're worried about? None of the numbers I saw while scanning look particularly worrying, and I doubt there's ever been a country on the face of this planet for which you wouldn't have been able to produce a similar list of issues of this magnitude - including past Norway.

They're worth paying attention to, but not sounding the alarm bells over.

It's seems totally reasonable to expect that Norwegians, who are still dumb apes like the rest of us, would be at high risk of suffering from "trust fund syndrome". Just like the countless families (and handful of countries) that totally burned through every dollar they didn't earn.

The author is basically pointing out that the country is now pretty much a country of trust fundies, and that usually that leads to higher levels of directionless meandering and lack of ambition. Scale it to country size and you would expect to see stuff like insane spending without much discretion, and a general careless approach to life.

Other countries have that. Other countries have lots of waste. But it's totally logical to assign Norway as high risk for "affluenza" and therefore monitor it's vitals with that idea in mind. It's not particularly hard for ~5 million people to blow $2 trillion in a few decades.

Norway seems to be doing fantastically well..if anything the reviewed book is guilty of a kind of rich-person luxurious complaining (over minor difficulties).

"Oystein Olsen, a former head of Norway’s central bank, said Bech Holte’s work is riddled with inaccuracies, including overstating the extent of the slowdown in productivity. Researchers at Norway’s Statistics Office said the book presents a deeply flawed version of economic history and pointed out that Norway is a small country, greatly influenced by external factors."

so lobbyists are trying for privatization in Norway huh. It's a bold strategy, Cotton. Let's see if it pays off for em.

Great example of a golden rule of media commentary; all economic news is bad news.

Low unemployment? That's a labour shortage.

High GDP growth? The economy is overheating.

High rates of foreign investment? We are losing control of our economy.

Country experiencing historic levels of prosperity? Wealth is making everyone lazy, fat and unproductive.

https://archive.ph/q7hRC

I think it's sovereign wealth fund is about 2T in assets, and Norway's population is about 5M so that's about 400k per person.

That hardly seems like a "trust fund kid" that seems a very good head start for the people, assuming it is well distributed (and mostly evenly).

I do agree with this sentence: "implementing stricter rules around how much the government can withdraw from the sovereign wealth fund." Politicians being what they are the incentives are poor here. The rules must be strong for it to have survived for so long, but making them stronger seems prudent.

The US is another good example of being “too rich.” For example, consider American infrastructure costs. The US spends >5x on infrastructure versus other developed countries [0]. NYC spent $2.6 billion dollars per mile to build the 1.2 mile Second Avenue Subway extension. Meanwhile, Paris spent $450M/mile [1]. A 500 mile high speed rail line connected LA and San Francisco is conservatively projected to cost $89-128 billion [2]; meanwhile, in Spain, it cost $60 billion to build 2500 miles of high speed rail [3]. It’s not just public spending that’s extreme relative to other industrialized countries; private construction is much more expensive in the US [4].

Wasteful spending on infrastructure is but one concrete example; we also see gross inefficiencies manifest in costs of American healthcare, education, defense, etc. While there are many complex factors contributing to such waste, a major underlying reason is that there’s simply so much money to go around that nobody bothered to optimize for costs, to the point that they’ve ballooned so unsustainably that the US is increasingly incapable of building anything at all.

[0] https://bettercities.substack.com/p/americas-infrastructure-...

[1] https://betweenhellandhighwater.com/2023/06/22/the-paris-met...

[2] https://hsr.ca.gov/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/2024-Draft-Bus...

[3] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/oct/11/spains...

[4] https://archive.is/pEDpn

It's called Dutch Disease.

And it did severely reduce Netherlands' competitiveness back when the Groningen gas field was operational.

Norway is a well off country, but compared to their Scandi peers Denmark and Sweden, they don't have as diversified an economy - especially innovation industries like Pharma in DK or DefenseTech in Sweden - due to their heavy ONG dependency [0].

Denmark is equally blessed with NatGas fields like Netherlands was (look at a map) and similar to Norway, yet they still incubated a domestic innovation industry and additionally retained a diversified manufacturing and agricultural economy.

Furthermore, large soverign wealth funds in democracies can become especially enticing to raid during protracted downturns or the rise of populism - look at Alaska's PIF as an example.

Additionally, plenty of black swans exist in the world now. The US-EU FTA makes US ONG exports signficantly more cost competitive than Norwegian offerings, and potential FTAs with MERCOSUR (Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay) and Canada can further reduce Norway's staying power in European energy markets. As Norway is not an EU member state, it's in a worse position to defend it's interests in it's largest market.

And that's the crux of the argument - Norway is unable to incubate alternative industries that can help diversify away from their ONG dependency, which increases the long term risks for Norway, and has risks that could lead to opportunistic raiding of their SWF.

[0] - https://oec.world/en/profile/country/nor#yearly-trade

> Henriksen wrote in an op-ed earlier this year, might have been: The Country That Should Have Been Even Richer

What's wrong with not rabidly chasing bigger wealth? Why has this become totally unacceptable in this world?

This reeks of late stage capitalist views.

> We are choosing a model that is uninspiring for capital investment

Sounds fantastic in my book.

I also like that sort of example:

> His examples include $2.6 billion to develop a carbon-capture project whose commercial viability remains unclear

What if the goal was carbon capture and not commercial viability? What worth will be your commerce if we choke ourselves out on carbon dioxyde? That's also the concept of subsidiary and state funded stuff, it's not because it's not commercially viable that it's not useful.

I'm also unconvinced by quotes like "the country is suffering from the dutch disease" while Norway seems to have done what's indicated in such a case, through its sovereign fund. Another mitigation for that is to avoid letting in too many foreign investments in, to combat the currency appreciation that comes as a symptom of dutch disease... which this article presents as a bad situation.

Sure, the country might face a challenge as the oil wells dry up, and I'm not saying everything is fine (although I think a lot of countries would prefer to have that sort of issue).

I also think cost-efficiency should be a goal, and a responsibility of the state for state-funded projects and endeavours. I'm absolutely not absolving things like overblown costs and delays in big government led projects, this shouldn't be an excuse either (although the definition of "overblown" for delays may vary from person to person).

But his article looks more like people upset that Norway's money isn't going to them, rather than worrying about the fate of Norway itself.

These don't seem like very big problems, but it will be interesting to see how Norway deals with an aging population while maintaining its very generous social programs. They are probrably the best suited country in the world to handle this, so what they do may provide a blueprint or a cautionary tale to other countries. Will they raise taxes, increase immigration, lower services or raid the wealth fund?

Asylum: Norway accepts asylum seekers under international obligations, but applications are rigorously vetted, and approval rates vary. In 2023, about 11,000 asylum applications were processed, with a significant portion rejected, per UDI statistics.

The CIA World Factbook (2010 estimates, updated for 2025) lists Norway’s ethnic composition as 83.2% Norwegian (including Sámi), 8.3% other European, and 8.5% other (non-European).

As a Norwegian, I can say that living here is awesome. Unless, you're a business owner, a founder, or have no work experience. The effects of the wealth tax has been insane. Businesses no longer have money to invest and every business that is not state-owned, is in survival mode.

The majority of the "rich" have already moved to another country. Business owners have to sell their business to a foreigner to be able to pay the wealth tax. These business owners use this money to move to another country and retire. Businesses has stopped hiring people without work experience. Even if you have a computer science / engineering degree. The brain drain has already started. The rich no longer invest in local initiatives like local sports, local businesses or volunteering as they are "disconnected". A lot less tax is being paid and to cover for this we need to withdraw more from the oil fund. It may take a few decades to empty the fund. But I think that money will be wasted within a decade if "hate" against rich continues. https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1857694219244048691

I am seriously worried about the future, and I am considering moving to Sweden. I love building businesses, but I feel that the state is stealing resources I need to build a business that can pay tax for the next generations.

The high sick leave thing is another serious matter. But when politicians deflect responsibility when they've made a mistake, especially when public scrutiny or pressure increases, they send a message to the rest of the Norwegian population that it is fine to take a few months off if work is too hard. This has not happened once, this has happened a few dozen times just the last few years. And founders, they do not have the right for a single day of paid sick leave unless they employ themself and pay extra tax.

Aren't there better examples of filthy rich oil states than Norway?

The goal of every civilization is to abolish work. I don't see the problem.

The answer is a no until you interfere with international oil consumption.

It is sad that Norway is not taking advantage of their unique situation. They could start making steps on redesigning capitalism and democracy. It is a combination of two flawed and never reviewed systems that together amplify their faults.

Capitalism has been tried in 100 countries over the past 100 years. Not a single country has reported a harmonious society without suffering and inequality. Failure over and over. Countries are running this program that is unfit for human society. Capitalism wasn’t scientifically researched nor updated according to the modern scientific knowledge in sociology, anthropology, economics, and human biology. In humans, it amplifies greed and materialism. It forces all humans into labour with less than 50% of jobs and occupations being useful, and another half is there just to employ people. Capitalism does not accept you for who you are, it will only accept you into system if you provide economic value, regardless if there’s already enough goods and food for everyone. And neither alternative to capitalism has ever been seriously researched. Not socialism/communism, but actually a professionally, scientifically researched and designed system? There were no serious attempts. We have institutions for physics, biology, construction, logistics, and every other science. And all of them make discoveries and move science forward. Except for this one. Why there’s no effort to research and design the social economic system to replace capitalism? Why is only this specific science in a standstill? And democracy is similarly assumed by everyone as some perfect system. Yet we use electoral democracy designed literally for 100 persons per representative. In Ancient Greece elected person knew every one of people they represented personally. And it grew now to 50,000 and more people per representative and nobody ever asked if that should be allowed. It wasn’t designed for this many, and it shows. Electoral democracy was the transitional system until we have computers capable of dealing with this amount of data. Elected officials were, and still are flawed human computers representing groups of people.

> Norwegians are taking much more sick leave than a decade ago, driving up costs for health services. Student test scores have worsened more than in other Scandinavian countries

...COVID?

Norwegians are taking more sick leave after the largest mass-disabling event in generations?

And test scores are worse compared to other Scandinavian countries, like Sweden, which famously had very few COVID restrictions?

Must be the oil money

Statistics are one thing.... individual realities are another. Taking different generations into same statistics makes it even worse.

Can an average young couple earning average pay in norway afford to buy a house/apartment there? Preferably large enough to have space for let's say 2-3 kids and young enough to actually have 2-3 kids (for demographic reasons)?

I live in a small country that used to be a part of a larger communist one, and our homeownership situation seems great, very high percentage of people own their homes, but the reality for young people is, that unless we do some drastic changes soon, buying a home will be impossible for a majority of them, and waiting to inherit their parents' apartment will take too long (demographic-wise... you can't really have kids in a 2 bedroom apartment with 3 roommates).

Non-paywall archive link: https://archive.ph/q7hRC

Wait, does this kind of mean , the work I do support random Norwegian who is Slacking off all day even though I don't even live in same country?

Someone has to still make the food they eat and clothes they wear.

I assume the poor people in Asian countries do it for them and still remain poor their entire lives even though they work probably 100x more.

What a shit show economic system we have made.

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